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But, less than a month after the grand opening of his Bitcoin store in a swanky Nicosia office block on February 24, Brewster is alleged to have abruptly disappeared abroad. His whereabouts remain a mystery.

His last communication with his staff was on March 19 when he told an employee he had gone abroad to raise capital, sources said.

Brewster publicly broke his long silence for the first and last time on April 2 when he vehemently denied any wrongdoing.

He said he originally left Cyprus on a ‘short-term temporary basis’ to raise additional capital ‘for the business through the sale of my equity as we had run out of liquidity’.

But, he added in a posting on an online bitcoin talk forum, he then received ‘threats’ targeting his young daughter, which he had reported to the ‘relevant authorities’.

At this point the Neo & Beo CEO said he decided to sell of his equity in the company and remain abroad, it is claimed.

A woman walks past the offices of Neo & Bee in Nicosia, Cyprus. Cyprus based bitcoin vendor Neo & Bee is under investigation by police after allegations it committed fraud against at least two of their customers

Denying claims of embezzlement, he insisted that ‘every single bitcoin raised and spent is accounted for’.

Police, however, said Brewster never informed them of the alleged threats against his young daughter.

He no longer lives with her mother but it is unclear whether he is divorced or never married.

The Financial Mirror said it ‘is not known whether Brewster has access to the nearly three mln euros worth of bitcoins that LMB [Holdings] maintains’, referring to Neo & Bee’s UK-based parent company.

It added Brewster threw a ‘smokescreen a few weeks ago by agreeing to pay some 35,000 euros in duties to import his Bentley’.

Another source told the Mail he also paid an entire year’s rent in February on a big house in an upmarket Nicosia suburb.

Neo & Bee halted operations in late March before its software to carry out transactions had even gone live.

But trading of its shares on the private Havelock Investments exchange has continued after a brief suspension earlier this month.

Their value has plunged along with the company’s market capitalisation.

Both the Cyprus Central Bank and the finance ministry issued warnings to customers after Neo & Bee’s lavish advertising campaign last month, saying the bitcoin was an unregulated virtual currency and therefore inherently unsafe.

But, according to Brewster’s sales pitch, it was traditional banks that people could no longer trust following the precedent of Cyprus’s painful ‘bail-in’ last year.

‘He kept telling us his idea was to build something that would either be taken over by some international big investor and make this into a regional or worldwide brand,’ the creditor said.

The tagline for Brewster’s promotional campaign was ‘Who is Neo?’ More pertinently, the Cyprus Mail’s front-page headline on Saturday asked: ‘Where is Neo?’